Stop complaining and pay programmers more

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476723

by wake_up_sticky • 16 years ago

227 269 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It seems like every time I check HN someone is bitching and moaning about how difficult it is to find competent programmers. Newsflash: competent programmers apparently have a skill that is extremely rare. Rare commodities are expensive.

It strikes me as senseless to complain endlessly about how 199 out of 200 candidates who are interviewed for a programming position are literally incompetent. No competent hiring manager should put out more than one ad posting which attracts a horde of unqualified candidates. Why not? Because the second time around he will offer a much more attractive salary.

And that's really the end of it. Enough of this nonsense.

amock2• 16 years ago

How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people? It seems like it will attract more of all kinds of programmers.

staunch• 16 years ago

It should improve the ratio though.

amock2• 16 years ago

Maybe, maybe not. I think a better way to filter people would be something like Justin.tv or Facebook does where they have applicants write code as part of the application. I don't have any experience with hiring so i don't have any real data, but I'd love to know how effective those are.

vaksel• 16 years ago

I'd imagine the incompetent ones wouldn't bother applying to jobs that are "way out of their league".

If you are "sucky" you might still apply for a $60K job, thinking that you might slide through. But you wouldn't bother applying to a $100K job, thinking that there'd be way more competent people applying so it'd be a waste of time

starkfist4• 16 years ago

I'd imagine the incompetent ones wouldn't bother applying to jobs that are "way out of their league".

Never done hiring before, eh?

DomesticMouse• 16 years ago

You'd imagine wrong, if my past experience is anything to go by.

dedward• 16 years ago

You'd imagine that, but you'd be wrong - there are a great many technical employees who don't realize they are way out of their league and will apply anyway.

kranner7• 16 years ago

The ethical policy you're imputing to most 'programmers' in the real world is far from the reality of it.

I regret not having applied to many great opportunities as a younger programmer because I filtered myself out, when many who are worse off never do.

Self-promotion: http://blog.codeboff.in/2010/06/25/good-programmers-are-hard...

timr2• 16 years ago

"How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people?"

You've got it exactly backwards: it's not intended to deter the unqualified, it's meant to attract the qualified.

And yes, high salaries do tend to attract good people. Maybe not exclusively, but it's an important factor. So, if the complaint is that "there are no good programmers" (and we assume that your screening process isn't totally arbitrary), there's a pretty good bet that you're not attracting good programmers from the places where they currently work. High salaries are a good way to do that.

scott_s• 16 years ago

You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well. Put another way, you may get more qualified people in absolute numbers, but the signal-to-noise ratio could go up, too.

j_baker• 16 years ago

You have to understand: there's more to hiring programmers than paying lots of money. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had a dot-com bust and software companies would be dominated by MBAs.

That's the hard part of hiring programmers. How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person.

chime2• 16 years ago

> How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person.

Bonuses, perks, and congrats on jobs well-done. If I spend 40 hours between Dec 31 and Jan 2 writing up a new wireless barcoding system because the powers that be decided at the last minute to begin the new year with a different process for warehousing, I better get a damn bonus, at least 1.5 x 40 hours of my rate. You know what I got upon successful completion of my last-minute project? "chime, if you had originally developed a flexible enough system to accommodate changing of bin/zone locations, you wouldn't have had to work in the last minute." I resigned from that job.

ryanbigg• 16 years ago

As a programmer bonus and perks are definitely incentives, but a nice steady "I love your work" kind of vibe is a great way to keep me in my job.

ww5208• 16 years ago

That was retard management at its worst.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

Bonuses, perks, and congrats on jobs well-done.

Maybe... certainly respect is needed but...

What about a sane work environment??

What about a system which is actually aiming to produce good software??

What about not structuring your system for 80 hours weeks from the get-go???

I don't know how many vile, worthless hoops I've had to jump through in previous job searches.

Still, I've also interviewed for places that made a virtue of their good process to the point of expected people to work for less (I think SAS was their model). That won't fly either because it's not really respect either.

dagw• 16 years ago

Bonuses, perks, and congrats on jobs well-done.

Speaking only for myself, non of those things would really swing it too much for me. Give me challenging projects in my preferred problem domain, sane working hours and environment, an opportunity to grow and improve my skills and surround me with brilliant colleagues to work with, and I'll happily forgo the perks and bonuses.

CyberFonic2• 16 years ago

Part of the problem is most managers are totally clueless as to how to identify a good programmer. Many of the worst programmers have the most impressive looking CVs and the best programmers don't have the time to futz over their CV. Besides, they probably never need to look for work - they get poached.

As for incentives, there are lots of posts on HN about incentives that work, like time out for pet projects, like telecommuting, like 2-3 month holidays, like no drone work, like excellent tools, LCDs, chairs, perks.

And ... the best of them all .... NO PHB's !!!

aufreak3• 16 years ago

I think there is a large factor of "specific incentives spoil the game for me" in programming. What I'm trying to say is, the moment you put a price on something you diminish its value and decrease motivation. Just pay the folks enough to get the money factor out of their minds and give them great challenging work. The last thing that a passionate and competent programmer actually wants to think about is money. Carrot/stick technology is outdated.

binaryfinery12• 16 years ago

Assuming you get everything else right, you have to offer more money. It has been suggested that this will cause your inbox to fill up too fast.

How about an online test? A web server that runs sandboxed C? Or maybe a character in Lambda MOO that requires you to complete a "quest" in a time frame that would require a programmed response? (telnet://lambda.moo.mug.org:8888)

parbo• 16 years ago

Spotify recently ran an online programming competition to find suitable candidates.

jseliger2• 16 years ago

You have to understand: there's more to hiring programmers than paying lots of money. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had a dot-com bust and software companies would be dominated by MBAs.

That's probably half-true: you're right that there's more to hiring programmers (and many other kinds of professionals) than paying lots of money, but there's also probably a minimum barrier to entry. I doubt you're going to find high-quality programmers to work for $30K per year, even if you buy them an Embody (http://www.hermanmiller.com/Products/Embody-Chairs), give them a window, offer to let them rewrite everything in Scheme, and do whatever else Joel Spolsky has mentioned.

I'm not sure what the minimum really good programmers will go for in most of the country, but I'd be surprised if the answer is less than about $50K, and even that's probably way too low. Until you hit the minimum threshold, the rest of your comment doesn't take effect.

_urga3• 16 years ago

Incentive == Money. Incentive !== Money.

roel_v4• 16 years ago

Huh?

silverlake2• 16 years ago

You first have to explain how programmers are different from any other profession, and how the law of supply/demand strangely fails here. Personally, I consider income, working conditions and project type. I'll apply if you offer a Wall St. salary, or let me work remotely, or are working on something I think is super cool. Offering $10K more than my current salary for the same job is not worth my time. What are you offering?

My friend is trying to hire some devs for her big bank. They offer ~$50K more, but the work environment is HELL and the projects are mind-numbingly boring (back office). They can't find any competent devs. He said they hired an ex-MSFT and ex-GOOG once, but both quit within a week.

mehip• 16 years ago

> How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you?

A good start is not to use words like "incentivize" around reasonably intelligent people :)

superuser2• 16 years ago

You make them respect you by understanding what they do and treating them like what they are: the people who create value for your business. You show actual respect for the work they do and give them interesting things to work on.

I think Fog Creek gets it right. You don't treat programmers like second-class drones who make things for you; you treat them like the primary creators of value for you company, and yourself as their support staff (abstracting away the mechanics of running a software company so all they have to think about is coding and typing commit.)

glomek2• 16 years ago

> you treat them like the primary creators of value for you company, and yourself as their support staff

Bingo! The best managers I have had over the years spent far more time getting me what I needed in order to do my job than they did telling me what to do. They also got the most value out of me, and ended up looking the best in front of their bosses.

glomek2• 16 years ago

> How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you?

Easy. Instead of giving the programmers managers, put the programmers in charge of their own projects and give them administrative assistants to handle all of the non-programming and non-decision-making parts of the job.

stray2• 16 years ago

jeffepp• 16 years ago

In software development, like most anything else, you really get what you pay for.

Being a non-technical co-founder, I did learn this the hard way a few times.

I totally agree that having a competent, hardworking and passionate programmer is probably the most important part of a startup.

mikemainguy3• 16 years ago

"In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you." — Warren Buffet CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

My Buffet said it best IMHO... I've worked with some competent, hardworking, and passionate with no integrity who have really caused a lot of problems.

damoncali3• 16 years ago

I think you have it exactly backwards. The best programmers I know seem to be indifferent to cash. They work on the most interesting project they can find that pays them enough to live. Hiring people like that is really tough.

jasonlotito6• 16 years ago

> The best programmers I know seem to be indifferent to cash.

No, they do care about cash. How do I know?

>They work on the most interesting project they can find that pays them enough to live.

There. That's why. If they weren't making enough money to meet their needs, they'd be looking to trade up. Money isn't the only answer. Everyone likes to talk about how money isn't the solution. I'm pretty sure every one is making a bit more than minimum wage or aren't looking to get compensated in some other way in the future.

damoncali3• 16 years ago

Yes, but offering more money to someone who feels like they already make enough is amazingly ineffective. My point is that, in my experience, great programmers place a much higher value on doing interesting work than they put on making more money.

bemmu• 16 years ago

I work in a pretty unsexy field (MySpace apps), and there's no amount of money I could pay to my researcher friends to drop their computer graphics projects and work for me instead.

mkramlich7• 16 years ago

Exactly.

I was advising a startup recently about what tech stack to use. Their default notion was PHP-centric. I pointed at the advantages of other languages/stacks. I said that while it's generally true you can get the job done in a variety of languages and tech mixes (anything that's Turing complete, eh?) it's still very important to pick the right mix, because it impacts other things. One of the things I mentioned was that it effects not just the quantity of folks you'll find on the market with that skill set, but also the quality and really the kind of person.

For example, if I had to wade through 100 random resumes from strangers for a dev job I had to hire for, I'd get very different kinds of people if it were for say a PHP stack versus if it were a Java stack or a Lisp stack. Very different folks, on average. To be more explicit, I'm confident there would be way more applicants if it were PHP, but way better applicants, on average, if it were Lisp. (I did not literally recommend they go with Lisp (dev scarcity factor still a bit too strong for my tastes right now, though Clojure may change that), but I will say that it was not PHP.)

binaryfinery12• 16 years ago

I am such a person. However, since I have a wife, two kids, and I track cars, "enough to live" means a LOT more than the genius buying the latest killer card deck. Work hard, play hard. Costs money.

shareme• 16 years ago

ah no its not..

Often the case is the hiring manager or firm not being upfront and the potential programmer running from the interview process due to that dishonest behavior

we tend to like upfront honesty and transparency because most of us are realists

makecheck2• 16 years ago

Money doesn't always attract people to a job. The purpose of good pay is to keep people from leaving! Nothing will destroy a code base like having its original designers leave; there has to be someone who can answer questions quickly.

I've never known the salary for a job at the time I applied. I'm not even sure I had a ballpark. It does come up in interviews, since companies tend to want to know what you're expecting. But why should I care? That's what an offer is: if I don't like the offer, I don't have to accept.

To attract good talent, you have to put your requirements right into your job posting. Ask for proof of work on open-source projects, for example; things that are hard to fake. A candidate that feels daunted by your application won't even make it to the interview.

mgkimsal2• 16 years ago

"But why should I care?"

If you know ahead of time they're only interviewing for a position that tops out at $35k and you don't want anything less than $60k, it's better to not waste everyone's time.

makecheck2• 16 years ago

If they're surprised that I expect more than they were planning to offer, they might also ask themselves why the difference would be so drastic. Maybe they compare their experience interviewing me, with others who seemed to want less, and make a connection. Or maybe that's wishful thinking. :)

ary• 16 years ago

Let's also address the issue of interviewing. Most people can't tell a good programmer from a bad one (which is sad, really). There are also a ton of people out there that mistake higher percentile technical competence with software development competence. This recently got posted to HN and sums up the overall situation nicely:

http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-real-programm...

Pay is but one factor, and resume (or job description) plus salary requirements aren't going to communicate what you really need to know. More than 90% of the jobs I've interviewed for had laughable interview processes. I've asked harder questions of my interviewers than they've ever asked of me. Most people just don't get it.

A "competent" developer needs to be hard working, interested in your particular problem set, and like the work environment you've created. You need to dig in and find out what this person is really about. Even if they're competent they may not like your company, idea, or even you. These are things you, and they, need to find out before the hire.

You/They aren't finding competence because you/they aren't looking for it.

rubinelli• 16 years ago

The best way to hire good programmers is by tapping into the network of the good programmers you already have. Everyone with a few years of experience has a short list of developers they'd like to work with again.

EDIT: sponsoring hackathons may be another way of finding great programmers. And don't forget the colleges in your area: if you have an interesting piece of technology you can show off, you can present a talk and hopefully get a handful of resumes.

kranner7• 16 years ago

Networking is a good strategy, but you have to temper it with interviewing and portfolios or it can turn into nepotism and a mushroom cloud of bad hires.

Hackathons and design contests like topcoder.com are great for employers but really bad for contestants, most of whom are left with nothing.

http://codeanthem.com might turn into something of an inverted marketplace where employers can compete for the attention of good programmers. (I'm not associated with codeanthem.com)

binaryfinery12• 16 years ago

Yes, and they all, without exception, have well paid, highly rewarding jobs. What would make them risk leaving that job?

mkn3• 16 years ago

If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities.

This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems to gum up the creative works.

When you compound that with how difficult it is to recognize, let alone find good talent, especially with an interview process, you have a real conundrum.

Real conundrums are rarely solved by naive one-dimensional solutions like "offer more money." An actual solution would have to solve the dual problems of finding good help and not spoiling it with overt incentives.

Clearly there is a real problem here. Perversely, if you could solve it, you could make a lot of money!

alttab• 16 years ago

Hey, you rationalize your pay grade anyway you want buddy, but speak for yourself.

I do what I do because I enjoy it, but I never take my eye off the bottom line - and either should you.

mkn3• 16 years ago

I don't see 1) how I was "rationalizing [my] pay grade," nor 2) what the remark about not taking one's eye off the bottom line has to do with anything.

The idea that the OP put forward was that simply offering more will solve the problem of finding competent programmers. My comment was related to recent and compelling research into motivation in creative work. It seemed related. I'm not sure I mentioned my pay grade.

Having one's eye on the bottom line is different from being subject to an incentive program, and different still from being competent. The latter is the more to the point. Anyone can be greedy. Even the incompetent. In fact, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, it might even be suspected that the incompetent are likely to feel more entitled to a higher wage than the competent.

I am not your buddy. However, I will offer the following friendly advice: You might enjoy the level of discourse on Reddit or Digg more than that on YC.

tsally• 16 years ago

Next time you decide to be an asshole you should probably construct a proper English sentence.

baddox• 16 years ago

I don't think that's necessarily the case. If you're looking for very talented programming, chances are they'll already have a somewhat decent job. To pull them from that job to yours, you'll have to offer at least as much as they're already making. Sure, 60,000 USD a year may be plenty, but someone making 65k will probably immediately subconsciously ignore the ad (unless of course they're very displeased with their current job and desperate for another, which probably is also rare for very talented programmers).

mkn3• 16 years ago

This just begs the question, though. If you assume that talent chases money and nothing else, then it follows that talent chases money and nothing else.

Particularly your second point about developers ignoring jobs salaried at less than their current pay. Working in a toxic environment, or doing meaningless work, or staying where one's range of expression is limited, all have a cost. You won't know until you get there, but when you do, you will.

danudey3• 16 years ago

Well, you'll have to offer them equivalent worth to what they're making. I left a high-paying job at a company that didn't appreciate its geeks to go to a lower-paying job whose entire staff (except for three project managers and the accountant) were geeks. The founder started the company doing websites in Perl in the 90's, and grew it into a small-scale hosting/app dev company. It's still private, it's still owned by the two original partners, and they still work their asses off every day at the company. The result is an environment that is not only geek-friendly, but geek-run.

Did I miss the large paycheques? Sure. Did I miss the stress? Or people breathing down my neck for results, a week after they said they'd get me the information I needed but never did? Or being denied my vacation pay because my previous management-approved sick days (most of which I spent working from home) were suddenly 'excessive'? I didn't miss that at all.

It isn't about offering people a better salary, it's about offering people a better package. If you only offer $60k to someone who's making $70k, but give them 4 weeks paid vacation, let them work from home three days a week, and let them expense their cellphone data plans and home internet, they'll be more interested.

Especially once you interview someone, you can sometimes figure out what kind of perks will most appeal to them. Mac fanboy? Offer to buy them a new iPhone on launch day every time one is released. You've just gone from $60k to $60.7k, but the employee is going to appreciate it a lot more, since he'll never have to budget for it again.

Does he like to travel? Offer up extra paid vacation, and then add to that $3000 of 'travel expenses' per year, for personal use. That's usually enough to fly two people anywhere in the world, return, so he and his girlfriend can take a nice long trip to Europe after you ship version 1.05 and everyone's ready to unwind. The idea that he won't have to budget for it - that he can just suddenly decide to go to Laos or Mumbai or Morocco, even if his bank account is on empty - will be appealing. It's like a 'get out of town free' card.

Tell all your employees you'll pay an accountant to do their taxes for them. It's a huge hassle for most people, and if you take that away tax season gets far less stressful.

So many programming jobs I've seen offer high salaries, but with minimal benefits. You get a stock health package, minimal vacation, and MAYBE you get to expense PART of your phone bill, if you're an admin on call. Take away all the junk that people don't want to worry about and let them focus on being geeks.

It's hard to offer this sort of thing in a job posting, but if you can lure the good people in to an interview, this is how you get them on board.

runT1ME• 16 years ago

You're looking at the problem in the short term. What offering more money can do is increase the prestige of a profession, and increase the number of intelligent people going into the field.

Right now a large majority of very smart, creative people are going into medicine because they want to be challenged and most likely also want the prestige and security of a well paying job. I know more than a few very bright friends who took some CS classes in college and weren't challenged, they ended up going into physics.

Software Engineering should be a high prestige job, to better attract talent to the field, not necessarily to keep your star programmer working for you.

hackinthebochs• 16 years ago

I've read the studies you mention and I think you misunderstand the point being made. If you incentivize work such that "Bonus X is dependent on doing Y", you get worse quality creative work. If you pay a person ahead of time such that they don't have to think about any rewards while they're working, they perform better creative work. Offering a higher salary would more likely be the proper motivation for creative work.

tbrownaw• 16 years ago

> The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities.

I get the impression that the mechanism for that is that anxiety about getting/losing the incentives can starve the creative processing of mental CPU time and maybe lower your risk tolerance below the optimum. A flat salary shouldn't trigger that regardless of how high it is, and conversely a poor environment (antagonistic management, mandatory overtime if you're not meeting some almost-reasonable deadline, ...) ought to be able to trigger it even if money isn't involved at all.

ww5208• 16 years ago

Paying more money takes it out of the equation and let you fine tune the other incentives. Companies that can get great creative work out of people pay them such that money is not an issue.

wake_up_sticky3• 16 years ago

"Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities."

Unadulterated nonsense. On the one hand, I recall a cartoon-drawing presentation about school contests and the like. On the other hand, there are these centuries and centuries of evidence that PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES, PERIOD.

If you think that a company couldn't assemble a team of OUTSTANDING programmers by offering each $200k a year, you're crazy or stupid or both.

jshen2• 16 years ago

"If you think that a company couldn't assemble a team of OUTSTANDING programmers by offering each $200k a year, you're crazy or stupid or both"

This is simplistic and naive. Money isn't what motivates most programmers. I know this may be hard to understand for many people on HN, but it's true. Many of the best programmers I know are passionate about a specific area or two. Imagine going up to one of the jruby developers and saying "Hey, I think you should stop working on jruby and make an asp.net site with me and I'll pay you $200k". They're polite so they probably wouldn't laugh on the outside.

The second major problem is the assumption that offering a lot of money will some how magically make it easy to identify good talent. It won't.

The third problem is that most good programmers aren't looking for work. Offering more money won't make a difference because they'll never know anyway.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

As a meta point the guidelines here request we use italics for emphasis rather than caps (you can do italics by putting a * either side of a section).

(I just noticed you were a new commentor so I hope that comes across ok :))

arethuza2• 16 years ago

Anyone clever enough to be worth $200K a year in salary will also know that anyone paying £200K a year probably has some very particular expectations - i.e. they have a ROI in mind.

People who are really good tend to have their own ideas of what platforms they want to work on and what kind of problems they find interesting. Anyone paying $200K a year probably doesn't expect to give much leeway.

Note: I know people who get paid that much, I wouldn't want their jobs. I've been approached for positions paying roughly that amount and said "no" purely on the description of the working conditions.

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

Centuries and centuries of evidence that people respond to incentives is based on prescriptive work. The studies that Dan Pink is referring to concern the more recent advent of creative and cognitive work does not have centuries and centuries of evidence for money as a motivator. That's why it's being studied, and that's partly why the results of the studies are so intriguing.

It's interesting that your gut reaction is that this is all nonsense, and that you dismiss a single presentation as being nonsense purely on your own feelings and reactions. The book that Dan Pink wrote, and the work being done in the field is at odds with your reaction.

I know I won't convince you, and I know that you'll simply dismiss me as crazy, or stupid, or both, but the programmers who work for me often took a pay cut to do so. And they've stayed.

My recent complaints haven't been about being able to find good programmers, they've been about incompetent programmers who claim they're great, and in all probability honestly believe it.

If you're solving any problem at all, it's the wrong one. I don't want more job applicants, I just want applications from better candidates. My experience, and the studies I've read, say that offering more money won't help. I hope you understand that I'll put more stock in them than in your naked and unsupported assertions.

binaryfinery12• 16 years ago

Actually, all the studies talk about incentives in the sense of "additional compensation that is conditional upon performance" not base pay. Here's why more money works: not everyone has the same expenses. Some of the best are married with kids. I don't like to spend time away from my kids or my wife, but knowing that when I take two weeks off its to go visit the wife's family that I'm paying to fly to Hawaii makes my life, and hers, that bit more bearable when she hasn't seen me for days. Yes, a low salary will get you some young qualified programmers, or some older ones with no life. But you will increase your hiring pool by offering more money. No, it doesn't solve the problem of how to tell the good ones from the shit ones, but it does increase the total number of good ones available.

jtheory2• 16 years ago

To cut through some of the BS around this: A salary that's sufficient and feels fair is essential for letting your talented coder check off that box and get on with life.

At the most basic level, if your developers aren't earning enough money to easily solve the myriad money-related problems of everyday life, those stresses will seriously affect their work. Money doesn't buy happiness, but lack of money can sure make it hard to find.

The pay also needs to be high enough that your developers don't feel worried that they're being ripped off -- that is, if they notice they you pay below the industry standard for the region, but they know their work is above average (in fact it may be way above average), they'll be forced to dedicate time to figure out if they're being taken advantage of. Not because they need the money, but because we all tend to think people who get tricked out of their money are fools, and they don't want to be seen as fools.

Once you get those two things out of the way, then you can focus on building real, non-monetary incentives for creative work -- interesting and diverse projects, sense of purpose, constant learning without forced massive leaps (good flow), allowing & encouraging mastery, etc..

It's absolutely true that just raising the money won't fix hiring problems once it's "high enough", but if you're simply paying too low, you don't have a chance.

ChRoss2• 16 years ago

"Rare commodities are expensive." I do agree on this one. However, money is not always the primary motivation/reason for people to join you. My friend once told me about how he asked his team, what is the reason for them to join a company. From tens of reasons, they finally come out with two only: FUN and TEAM.

kjksf2• 16 years ago

The problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those. At best during interview you meet a few team members for an hour each and maybe another hour during team lunch and everyone (including you) puts their best foot forward. There's no way to tell if they'll be a great team to work with or a daily nightmare.

The same goes for fun: rarely you know exactly what you'll be doing or how interesting it'll be.

The thing about money is that easy to compare. If you have 2 offers from companies that are both startups, both well funded with seemingly great people and interesting problems to solve, it's very compelling to decide based on salary, because all other aspects are hard to compare and judge before you spend a few months working at a company.

jshen2• 16 years ago

"the problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those"

this is a real challenge. I'm trying to get better at judging if a company is good to work for, but so far it still feels like a crapshoot.

Of course, we often cheat and go to places where we already know someone :)

Towle_• 16 years ago

A relative of mine works as a database administrator making $120k/year and lacks fluency in HTML/CSS. By contrast, Google regularly comes under fire for underpaying their employees, and their average employees are more talented than those of perhaps any other large corporation in the world.

It's not about money.

hello_moto3• 16 years ago

I'd take DBA if that would be the last job I ever had (leading to retirement). Otherwise it might be a career killer.

I'd take Google job if I'm fresh out of college for the sake of experience so I can get better position, salary, and wide-range of opportunities in the future.

But check this out: if there's a better place than Google and they pay better, do you not expecting Google's employees to jump ship? (for example, Facebook pays more or Facebook has a good potential to make yourself to become a millionaire)

These 3 examples are strategy to position yourself for a better future. A better future usually involves better position and/or compensation. Sometime it's not about money, but it's about power. Power to tell fellow developers that they're not that good so they have to do TDD, code-review, and help QA to test their own shit.

Yes, it's not _entirely_ about money, but at the end of the day, mostly it is about money, especially for people who can accept other negatives.

ww5208• 16 years ago

Branding has value, which is factored into the total compensation.

ojbyrne2• 16 years ago

I have a simple theory. Most managers are still educated according to Taylor's Scientific Theory of Management, where the managers are more intelligent than the "factors of production," and their role is to "scientifically" direct their work so that they create additional value (which is multiplied by how many workers they have reporting to them). Their salaries reflect that model, and thus is proportional to the salaries of their direct reports times the number of direct reports they have. This is well-ingrained in the workplace, and in society.

Unfortunately programming is really the first discipline where the primary determinant of the "factor's" productivity is not the manager's skill but actually the intelligence of each individual. There's huge conflicts created, not just about salaries, but job roles, and really the structure of society (which is really built around an educated managerial class overseeing (and living apart from) a less educated working class.

The primary issue with paying programmers more is that they're butting up against those managerial salaries and life roles. Programming doesn't fit Taylor's theory. To change that isn't just about micro changes in business, it's about macro-changes in society.

mikemainguy3• 16 years ago

That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.

vishaldpatel• 16 years ago

Docs, mechanics, skilled tradesmen, lawyers,...hell even accountants have location knowledge and expertise that is location specific.

- You won't drive your car cross country to a cheaper mechanic. - You won't get a lawyer from India to represent you in America. - You don't go to a doctor... well thats changing isn't it? Too bad doc education still costs so damn much in America.

Its about group supply and demand. Don't forget that homes cost and arm and a leg and that a programmer in a particular neighborhood should be able to afford a home in that neighborhood and should charge accordingly.

raffi2• 16 years ago

I read a great article in the Harvard Business Review about what defines a profession. Their question: are managers a profession akin to Doctors and Lawyers?

The author defined a professional as someone whose work you have to take on faith. Not being doctors or lawyers ourselves, we're usually unable to evaluate the quality of legal advice or medical care we're receiving. The best we can do is seek another opinion.

The author drew this line because he feels it necessitates the things we expect from a profession: shared ethics and a rigorous certification process. Professions require would-be professionals to jump through a number of hoops to make sure that all who deal with these professionals receive some minimum level of service from someone with a minimum level of competence.

Have software developers arrived at this point? Can someone check the quality of what they receive from a developer without being a developer? If they can't, will this always be true?

jafl5272• 16 years ago

But lawyers don't normally work in a management hierarchy, do they? And I'm pretty sure hospital administrators hate physicians just as much as managers hate programmers. (Not all of them do, of course, but I'm guessing it's similar.)

mkramlich7• 16 years ago

Doctors and lawyers can't engage in their profession since the age of 10 or so, like programmers can. Doctors generally cannot be self-taught like programmers (what practice surgery on a neighbor?). Programmers can literally envision things in their minds, and then make them come to life after putting hands on keyboard -- there's no effective equivalent in medicine and law. (Biology/biochem/chem, sure.) Also doctors and lawyers have to be accredited by a government board at least at the state level, programmers do not. Doctors and lawyers generally have to spend (or go into debt for) 10's to 100's of thousands of US dollars before being officially allowed to practice in their field -- programmers do not. And in general, the cost of mistakes in programming are small, with no lives or fortunes at stake (in the general case.), unlike law and medicine. Lastly, from what I can tell, in the US the average programmer will make anywhere from 1/2 to more likely 1/10 what a lawyer or doctor will make in their respective careers.

There are many differences between the professions of programming, medicine and law. So it's hard to make sweeping generalizations and use that to draw definitive conclusions.

Programming is very different.

ww5208• 16 years ago

Doctors, dentists, and lawyers have legislated their jobs so that they can maintain monopoly through their guilds and licenses. That's why they can charge such a high rate. If programmers can get non-licensed programmers writing code go to jail, their rate would go up, too.

watmough• 16 years ago

Isn't it even worse? None of those professions have access to copy and paste!

We all know programmers who would be sunk without it.

alextingle• 16 years ago

We should not seek to emulate doctors or lawyers, but cabinetmakers, watchmakers and joiners.

Programming isn't a profession, it's a craft. The trouble is that traditional crafts are not really valued any more, as their purpose has largely been supplanted by mass production. So, we have no current role models for how to organise ourselves.

ojbyrne2• 16 years ago

Doctors and lawyers are typically self-employed, or they're employed at institutions that require (often by law) that managers actually have to be doctors or lawyers. So you're correct, they are like programmers, but a solution has been reached already for the problem I describe. I'm not sure skilled tradesman (not to denigrate their work) have the same "productivity is determined by intelligence" issue.

Alex633• 16 years ago

Agree. And all the replies to this post about the specifics of medicine or law seem to me to be missing the point. There are fields other than programming where "workers" have more domain-specific knowledge than "managers". Mikemainguy was responding to the perceived assertion that programming is the only occupation where this is true. He is offering counterexamples to the statement that "programming is really the first discipline where the primary determinant of the "factor's" productivity is not the manager's skill but actually the intelligence of each individual"

roel_v4• 16 years ago

What the OP is rallying against aren't the typical 'managers' in big companies. The people who complain here (and on their blogs) about how difficult it is are small companies, at the cutting edge of technology, usually startups run by twenty or thirty somethings. The same people who, a couple of years ago, ranted and raved about how programmers aren't cogs etc. just like in your post. Now these people need to make a profit and all of a sudden they find out - "hey, it's not as easy as I thought". So then their strategy switches to 'let's pay people peanuts to work on "interesting problems" so that they can "do the things they love" - with the next step being incessant whining about how they attract only unqualified applicants.

adamc2• 16 years ago

The "first"? I don't think so. Consulting engineers, lawyers, etc. have been around for a while; their productivity was always more a function of the individual than of their managers.

The primary problem is that organizations seem to want to treat developers like other office workers, rather than as professionals.

Oops, just saw someone else said this below. He is correct.

known• 16 years ago

Management = Leadership + Administration + Manipulation

roadnottaken• 16 years ago

<I>Unfortunately programming is really the first discipline where the primary determinant of the "factor's" productivity is not the manager's skill but actually the intelligence of each individual.</I>

Are you really suggesting that programming is the <b>first</b> profession to arrive on the world-scene in which productivity scales with intelligence? I think that's a bit egocentric. I can think of a few others.

lg• 16 years ago

Programmers are the managers and computers are the factors of production.

pointernil• 16 years ago

I mostly agree, except for the part claiming "programming" to be the first discipline encountering this "issue".

I think this is true for most professions based on knowledge and using mostly mental capabilities: scientists, journalists you name it...

Rating mental work is very hard and still quite a new requirement for our societies, thus we are really missing reliable and acknowledged "frameworks" to handle this.

fforw• 16 years ago

Every programmer is an executive in the sense that his code actually ends up doing business decisions -- all in a complexity far above the average managers head. I guess they'd be scared shitless if they'd understand it.

mikemainguy3• 16 years ago

But there's a perverse side to this. By offering MORE compensation, it would seem likely that MORE unqualified people will apply. For your logic to work, we'd need to show that making a skill more expensive would automatically cause inept people to stop applying. If that doesn't hold true, you could be throwing away 999 out of 1000 candidates instead of 199 out of 200.

mkramlich7• 16 years ago

That's what I concluded too! If you raise industry standard average pay it's just going to attract even more incompetent people and therefore the flood of applications from non-programmers will increase.

binaryfinery12• 16 years ago

Actually you'd be throwing away <=998 of 1000 instead of 199 out of 200: we're proposing that the net result would be more hires.

We don't have to show that it would make inept people stop applying. We just have to be able to get better at weeding out the rubbish ones - i.e. in less time, lower cost.

brown9-2• 16 years ago

How many job postings even mention salary beyond "salary commensurate with experience"? We must be seeing different types of postings.

scumola• 16 years ago

Job postings have salary ranges. If I have 80 years of experience and ask for $500k/yr salary, I'm not going to get it.

mkramlich7• 16 years ago

The whole "years of experience in X" thing is horribly broken and ridiculous. Because there isn't a uniform way of measuring it. It's apples-to-oranges with any one else's way of measuring it, even if you yourself were consistent within your own system. Plus every job is different. Plus, in software you can be programming for many years in a language but never at a day job -- only on home projects or (more recently) open source projects, and yet this experience wouldn't count in some people's eyes. Plus there's the whole multi-variable thing where someone with say 2 years of Ruby preceded by 6 years of Java is generally going to be a more experienced/senior programmer than someone who has 4 years of Ruby ONLY (nothing before that) -- but each person is "farther along" experience-wise depending on your particular crazy-ass assumptions about measuring experience. It's an utter joke.

kjksf2• 16 years ago

There are 2 problems with your proposed solution.

a) Salary is rarely disclosed in a job posting. Salary negotiations usually happen after a candidate was interviewed and deemed worth hiring.

b) Even if you were to disclose a salary in a job post, an unusually high salary might make it easier to find a qualified programmer (because more people will apply) but it is not likely to increase an average quality of submitted resume, so you'll still have to look at 200 resumes to find 1 good candidate.

ww5208• 16 years ago

I believe Rethinkdb did post their salary range and stock option at one point.

JoachimSchipper6• 16 years ago

Yes, at http://rethinkdb.com/jobs/. It's quite public.

xenophanes• 16 years ago

How exactly does offering a higher salary prevent hordes of unqualified candidates from applying?

CyberFonic2• 16 years ago

It doesn't, that's why you need to have good hiring selection processes in place.

But paying the good programmers you already have a much higher salary and looking after them well will deter them from jumping ship.

cheald• 16 years ago

Why are you concerned about who applies? Wouldn't you be more concerned that offering a low salary is going to have the same hordes of unqualifieds applying, without the benefit of the actually qualified people applying as well?

coffeemug2• 16 years ago

I suppose this refers to us (and our Will the real programmers please stand up post). If it doesn't, excuse our self-centeredness and kindly disregard this message.

Our salary structure is designed to select for exactly the type of people we want to attract - the kinds of people that will go through walls to bend the world to their will, for some deeply ingrained reason unknown to anyone but them. For people like that, we pay an incredibly high salary that they're unlikely to find anywhere else (2.25% of everyone's contribution on the high end). If you're the type of person who wants to change the world and have a shot of building a one billion dollar business while doing it, you're unlikely to find a higher compensation anywhere other than choosing to start your own business.

If you're interested in having a stable, $200K job, RethinkDB is not for you. Neither of these choices is better or worse, simply different. It's a question of temperament. We weren't complaining, we were working to recruit great programmers who are driven to change the world. This is exactly what the post accomplished.

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

..and yet you aren't attracting the people you want.

Hmmmm.

coffeemug2• 16 years ago

Of course we are. We just need more :)

ww5208• 16 years ago

Why don't you pay 200K for the positions and see what happen?

JoachimSchipper6• 16 years ago

Because it's entirely feasible that they go out of business?

techiferous• 16 years ago

"unlikely to find a higher compensation anywhere other than choosing to start your own business."

Which is exactly what I did. Freelance contract programming pays the bills (and is quite enjoyable) and I'm bootstrapping a startup on the side. It's not so much for the compensation as the challenge of something new and the independence to make my own decisions.

So at least in my case, it's not your fault. You can put the most attractive job offer out there and I won't bite. I'm wondering if there are a lot of programmers like me. That would certainly reduce the supply.

nickzoic• 16 years ago

waves. Yeah, I literally fell into the consulting business, and here I still am, 2-1/2 years later, slowly transmogrifying from a consultant into a small business. It'd not really about the money: as a family guy flexibility counts for a whole lot more.

roel_v4• 16 years ago

(2.25% of everyone's contribution on the high end)

I'm probably dense, but what does that mean?

JoachimSchipper6• 16 years ago

They offer stock options.

dreepers10• 16 years ago

tl;dr: Choose to start your own business.

jurjenh• 16 years ago

I don't know if it would work, but has anyone tried or heard of a job posting with a "name your price" salary? Similar to the "scariest pricing idea" that was on HN a while ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1279660). I'm not sure if this would improve the S/N ratio or make the whole thing more complicated - my idea of what I'm worth is probably quite different to someone else.

pyre• 16 years ago

Then problem becomes one of differentiating between the people over-value themselves, the people that under-value themselves, and the people that correctly value themselves...

faitswulff• 16 years ago

Well how about the other side...how do employers take mediocre to crappy programmers and teach them to shine?

fsniper• 16 years ago

This never happens. 1. Employers do not have the incentive and time to educate employees in the first place. 2. Employees, most of the mediocre ones, do not want to learn more, do more or work more. Because, the process is always about practicing and working.

JeffJenkins• 16 years ago

My impression is that most programming jobs don't give a salary range in the job description. If they do include one, the Dunning–Kruger effect[1] could make the more qualified people who are humble think they weren't qualified and they could decide to skip on the job.

If Salary.com tells me that the 75th percentile for my general qualifications in my area is 80k, I'm not going to believe that I'm qualified for a job paying 120k. My mind would resolve that discrepancy in favour of the job requiring something I don't have, not just they employer's willingness to pay well. This may even be true if they say why the salary is so high

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

noonespecial• 16 years ago

The same thing is (and has been) happening with nursing. They complain endlessly about the "nursing shortage" unable to figure out why people might be unwilling to do a hard job for long hours requiring extra education and incurring outsized liabilities for extremely low pay.

The really bad news is its starting to catch up with many doctors as well.

huhtenberg2• 16 years ago

> for extremely low pay

Not sure where you are from, but here in Canada nurses lead very cushy lives. Salaries of 80 to 120K are not uncommon, and that's with 4 weeks of vacation, 1 day in / 3 days out schedule, etc.

chrisa• 16 years ago

Here's a link to information about base pay for nurses in the US (2006). It actually mentions the nursing "shortage" at the top: http://www.allied-physicians.com/salary-surveys/nursing/

Alex633• 16 years ago

As the spouse of a former Canadian nurse, and friend of others, I think you might be stretching the definition of cushy. Average salary for an RN in Canada a couple of years ago was about $32/hour. You probably would clear $80K if you were a full time nurse, because of all the mandatory overtime.

If being an RN was cushy, I think there'd be less of a shortage of working nurses in Canada.

rythie• 16 years ago

Not like that in the U.K. I think

earl3• 16 years ago

Do you actually know any nurses, because I doubt it from your description.

My gf is an EMT, and two of my sisters are nurses. Here's the actuality:

Nurses are paid OK. They work long stressful jobs with severe penalties, both moral and civil, for screwing anything up. There is a high chance of serious injury, particularly while trying to move or assist fat or obese patients, of which there are more and more due to the obesity epidemic and diabetes. Working as a nurse or EMT means physical labor involving long periods of standing on your feet; little control over when your shift ends, no matter what the schedule says; having to work very early morning or very late evening shifts to get 100% coverage; and very little flexibility during the day. You know how you can run small errands and do little errands with your computer? They, for the most part, can't.

They also have ongoing education and certification requirements that they most often pay for out of pocket.

Finally, being an EMT, paramedic, or nurse means not only developing an intimate relationship with bodily fluids of all sorts but seeing on a daily basis the worst things that can happen to a human being. From mangled bodies from car accidents to cancer, to diseases (including those that require hazmat suits and offer severe risks if anything goes wrong), to infected wounds, to septic shock or heart failure or stroke, they see all the things that can go wrong with a human.

So yes, they're fairly well paid, but I wouldn't describe their actual jobs as anything like "cushy".

arethuza2• 16 years ago

I wouldn't describe nurses in the UK NHS as being underpaid either:

http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/details/Default.aspx?Id=4

binaryfinery12• 16 years ago

Managers assume that because one good programmer will do the job for $100k that all good programmers will. Many here point out that good programmers will generally find a job that challenges them, and that pays them enough to live. They then conclude that if $100k fills one seat, then $100k is the right price.

This is totally wrong, and the key is "enough to live". I love programming as much as I did when I was 10. My expenses, however, are now somewhat higher than when I was 10. I have a wife, two kids, will not live in a small house, have very expensive car insurance, and I road-race big cars, hard on tires. If you want to hire me, it will cost a lot more than $100k.

Then there is the issue of mobility. Programmers tend to be loyal. They tend to be realists. If I make X here, and I know here to be fun, why would I risk moving for 1.1X, or even 1.5X?

What you have a reversible reaction in equilibrium. You want to bind seats to programmers. Programmers will bind to a seat for a while. But not all programmers will bind for the same price. Sure you can fill a seat for $100k. You might be able to fill a seat for $20k - but you'll have to wait a loooong time. If you want to fill all your seats, you're going to have to appeal to the largest possible pool of good programmers, and some of us need more money.

Even if you ignore the fact that those of us with higher expenses have more experience, the simple math of the equilibrium reaction tells you that if you want to fill more seats, you have to have a bigger pool. Even if we are of no more value than the 20 year old, the question is: Are 5 programmers better than 4 for your business?

Whether or not that makes economic sense for your business is up to you.

So yes RethinkDB, $125k for an Engineer III will get you some hires, but are you going to insist that this is the right price, even if it means that you have empty seats? What is your opportunity cost? It may be the right decision. But it may not.

starkfist4• 16 years ago

They have $1.2 million dollars, they can't pay more. $125K is a huge pre series-a salary.

binaryfinery12• 16 years ago

They're also offering stock of course, and it actually looks interesting :-) Plus they may not be so time sensitive: 4 programmers for 10 months vs 5 programmers for 8 months (yes I know). But if its $125k vs $150k will that $25k break the bank? Maybe. Maybe not.

roel_v4• 16 years ago

This is another one of those nonsense excuses. If they can't pay the proper price, they won't be able to get the best people. Period. I'd like to drive a Lamborghini Gallardo yet I'm stuck with a crappy Citroen. Do I go out and bitch on a blog about how I can't find Lamborghini's (with the implicit assumption that I can only afford 1/10 of the normal market price)? No I accept that I can't afford it and make due with what I have.

gersh• 16 years ago

I think you can hire good programmers for cheap, but the tricky part is retaining them. Programmers can be hired for relatively low-wages, but then they should raises every few months. Turnover can be really expensive, and it often isn't factored in. Further, maintenance work may not help the programmers develop marketable skills, so they strong incentive to quit.

jseliger2• 16 years ago

The same problem happens in grant writing, my family's field, to the point that I wrote a longish blog post on the subject: http://blog.seliger.com/2008/08/08/tilting-at-windmills-why-... . My guess is that it happens in many others too, and people who are smart eventually realize they'll have to pay for quality or accept lower quality.

Sometimes bargains can probably be found, but they're probably rare and difficult and don't last very long.

Getting really good grant writers (like us) is going to cost at least $100 an hour, and probably more like $125 – 200. The same is, as far as I can tell, true of web consultants. Good lawyers? $300/hour. Escorts? Probably also $300 in most of the country.

If you don't realize how much things and services costs, you'll end up with sub-par quality, or you'll pay, and/or you'll complain. A lot of people do the latter. I wouldn't expect it to stop.

dirtyaura2• 16 years ago

I feel that good/great programmers ask too little. Because there's order of magnitude of variance in skill sets and productivity, there should be much more variance in salaries.

In Finland, if you leave out top 0.5%, the variance is between 2000€-5000€. And most of it settles around 3000-4000€. Finland is very eqalitarian society when it comes to salaries and thus that has to be taken into account. But still. 2.5 is not much, think how much variance there is in salaries of managers, lawyers, doctors.

How's it in States, what are the typical salaries for good or great programmers vs. below-average progammers? Leave out top 0.5% - i.e. rare individuals with specialized skill sets in e.g. bank security.

tl• 16 years ago

Different parts of the US have such large variances in the cost of living that it's hard to give a meaningful answer (i.e. non-skilled labor here has greater variance than that).

dirtyaura2• 16 years ago

How about e.g. in Bay Area? What's a typical range for skilled programmer and what a horrible coder can earn while hiding inside some clueless big co?

earl3• 16 years ago

The knowledge that there is huge variance in productivity level of programmers is kind of useless, because we mostly lack the ability to reliably measure true productivity. Similar to advertising: "I know I waste half of my advertising dollars...I just wish I knew which half." You can really only pay amazing devs more if you can figure out which devs are the amazing ones.

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

Having tried this approach I can tell you that offering more money results in perhaps a doubling of the number of barely competent programmers, a ten-fold increase in the number of completely clueless, and no apparent increase in the number of people we'd actually want.

My results are not statistically valid, I've only gone through the hiring cycle five times, but my impression from actually trying it is that salary is not what it's about.

Dan Pink said it well:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439939

The problem isn't attracting candidates, it's getting the candidates to see your job opening, to understand that it's a great place to work, and then filtering out the clueless.

jasonlotito6• 16 years ago

> The problem isn't attracting candidates, it's getting the candidates to see your job opening, to understand that it's a great place to work, and then filtering out the clueless.

And then offering them enough money so they don't have to worry about it. Because, I'm sorry to say, minimum wage isn't going to cut it.

binaryfinery12• 16 years ago

2ND VIDEO: 4m50s:

"IF YOU DONT PAY PEOPLE ENOUGH, PEOPLE WONT BE MOTIVATED."

"THE BEST USE OF MONEY IS TO PAY PEOPLE ENOUGH TO TAKE THE ISSUE OF MONEY OFF THE TABLE".

"ONCE YOU DO THAT THERE ARE THREE FACTORS THAT LEAD TO BETTER PERFORMANCE..."

Once you do that. Clear? Once you pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. This is your link dammit.

For me, with a wife, two kids, and a car racing habit, that "enough" is a lot higher than it is for a 20yo student. Its about $130k in fact.

As for your results, as you say: "not statistically valid". That actually means something.

BrandonM3• 16 years ago

What about those Hacker News members who are looking for jobs? Is there a good resource of tech positions available?

Personally, I'd love to see a nicely-indexed list of jobs. Things like location, work environment, remote working arrangements, languages used, expected number of hours worked, typical responsibilities, schedule flexibility, vacation possibilities, who I'd be working with, degree of autonomy, level of recognition for work, perks and benefits, etc. are all factors that go into liking a job. And that's not even mentioning money.

Personally, I'd love to start a job working remotely at $40/hour for 20 hours a week or so. Once it was determined that I'm a good fit, I'd be willing to relocate to a lot of different places (e.g., Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, New York, pretty much anywhere warm and coastal).

I think the question isn't so much why is it so hard to find the right employee or job. The real questions are:

What are the actual job requirements? I don't mean traditional notions of what a reasonable work week are. I mean what do you truly need? It might be possible to get a rock star developer working for you at a cost of $40K per year, if you can eschew the standard notion of a 2000-2500 hour per year commitment.

If you're a potential employee, what do you really want from the job? Focusing on the money is not the answer. Make sure that what you'll be doing, who you'll be working with, and where and when you're working all fit well with your personality and work habits.

And why is it so hard to match jobs and people up? Is there a decent resource anywhere that I could use to actually narrow down job opening according to a slew of criteria? In a high-demand field, doesn't it make sense for the potential workers to post what they want in a job, and have the jobs bend to that? Maybe I'll make a submission along those lines...

c00p3r• 16 years ago

That was solved years ago. Just consider how a professional soccer team (including the double) are managed and paid. ^_^

hint: it is not just a performance and productivity, its also morale, influence and starness factors. And it works.

Vivtek2• 16 years ago

Looking at a lot of the posts on here, it seems that the bar to finding good programming staff is (1) finding good programmers and allowing them to find you and (2) weeding out the chaff.

Furthermore, it seems that weeding out the chaff is something probably everybody could agree on - that is, what would be nice is some kind of informal certification process or standard test. Nothing like an AMA board certification or the attorney's bar in terms of formality and obligatory nature, but perhaps some kind of hoops to jump through.

Perhaps some kind of list of programming tests and a way to administer them?

Sukotto• 16 years ago

There are a bunch of certifications already. They are either too simple or too narrow to be particularly useful for hiring purposes (imho).

The best way I've seen to evaluate the ability of a programmer and their* fit at your company is to:

1) Ask them to program something simple in the language you expect them to use.

2) Present them with a problem your team recently faced and ask them to talk through how they would approach finding a solution.

3) Ask them about things that relate to your startup/corporate culture (eg. if you're a bunch of practical jokers, ask them about practical jokes they've done or been victim to)

4) Ask them what part of your product sucks the worst. What specific thing would they do to improve it? Why would that be an improvement?

5) Have all your short-list people meet and spend some time together. In a followup interview, ask each about their opinions of the others.

* I hate to use "they" and "their" as a gender-neutral, singular pronoun but haven't really found anything better :-(

chrisbennet• 16 years ago

Employers: It's not about pay it's about value.

I agree with the original poster to the extent that I see some employers trying to get a "deal" on a great programmer without compensating the lower pay with great work, meaningful equity, or good work/life balance.

You've seen the job posting by Big Dumb Company that wants a "rock start programmer" but has strict policies that won't let them pay rock start salaries or give more than 2 weeks vacation their first year, telecommute, etc.

Then there are the small guys that want you work for peanuts in exchange for worthless stock options i.e. they want you to take $30K less pay per year and if they ever have a liquidity event your diluted stock would be less than that $30K you per year you gave up. If they fail (and they usually do) you'll get squat.

ianloic• 16 years ago

Hiring managers don't list a salary. If they do they're looking to hire really junior engineers who probably can't write a linked list reversal program anyway. In my 13 years working at startups I've never applied for a job that listed a salary range.

Ultimately, within reason, good programmers are worth whatever you have to pay them and bad programmers aren't worth what you pay them. There are way more bad programmers than good programmers and money isn't the way to attract the good ones. You have to attract them with interesting problems and a great work environment. If they're there for the money then they're probably no good anyway.

sdfx• 16 years ago

Different people are attracted by different things. For one it's the money, for others the environment, culture or challenges. But usually it's a combination of all of these factors. You can't just disregard money as an influencing factor in the decision making process of a potential employee. After all, you wouldn't be working for free. Sure, there is always the exception to the rule - the person that isn't interested in money at all. But in general money is a pretty good incentive for doing something.

The salary that a company offers might not be listed in a job offering, but the culture and many other factors are neither. And even though they are not listed you probably heard of companies with a great culture etc. Don't you think the same is true for salaries?

Russelldb• 16 years ago

My theory on this is that it is a market for lemons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Solve that problem to solve this one.

silverlake2• 16 years ago

Extend the idea of "lemon laws" to hiring. Every new hire has a 3 month try-out period (as a contractor?) where they will be fired if it doesn't work out. If you make this point forcefully during the interview, some low-quality applicants will seek safety elsewhere rather than risk losing their job, while high quality applicants won't be deterred.

r3570r3• 16 years ago

Most companies have highly stupid standards and requirements. Most of them prefer older platforms and frameworks just because their customers require older versions. Top notch enterprise solutions are still using IE6 to check compatibility of their products. That gives them all the possible negative Karma. On the other hand, innovative tech giants like Google are using their closed proprietary technologies, which is not doing the world any good. MS actually seems to be the better one here allowing people to use their Visual Studio, making a product out of it. Every language has its weaknesses. A developer proficient in programmer should not stick to a company for his development works and venture off privately. That will create the likes of DuckDuckGo and all the good that is out there changing the way we look at the tech world right now.

terra_t• 16 years ago

When it comes to wall street bankers, there seems to be a consensus that money is the only thing that's going to bring in good talent.

When it comes to programmers, the consensus seems to be the opposite. I mean, they ought to be motivated by having a refrigerator full of Red Bull or being able to bring their dogs to work -- I mean, the Linux kernel got developed by people who work for free... Why do we need to pay people anything at all to develop applications for our intranet?

Although you'll find programmers with very different stories, I think that we'd see a healthier IT ecosystem if software people got more pay and respect (a friend of mine and myself both got offered a particular job... for him this was a big step up in pay and benefits, and for me it would have been a step down -- I've seen the compensation of programming jobs where people do comparable work vary by more than a factor of two.)

I think the "equity culture" is often part of the problem. There are startups in my town that pay $10 /hour, no benefits + equity (which might be worth something, otherwise not.) I also interviewed at a place where people were starting a new job shop; they seemed like a nice bunch of folks, they had all the trappings of "good management" (the CEO was a freshly minted MBA from an Ivy League school) but the biz plan didn't make a lot of sense to be and they were talking low base pay + some equity... This is a frickin' job shop... The kind of place where you might get $50,000 worth of equity and really be able to cash it out for $40,000 if you're insanely lucky.

That said, the interview question they asked me was the best interview question I'd ever been asked. They asked me to estimate a project they'd done for a client. I was smart enough to ask questions rather than blurt out a quick answer ...

I estimated about 160 hours for the project, and they told me it really took 200. That's not far off for a "seat of the pants" estimate, but driving home I thought... These guys probably charge $150/hr to clients; their client spend $30k for a really crappy intranet app that tortures end users... they "need" it for regulatory compliance, but there's no way that this app creates $30k worth of value.

For christsake they wasted 40 hours dealing with a deadbeat D.B.A.!

So that got me thinking about where my career was going and about software economics. For instance, if you want to get paid $150k a year, that money has to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, the shortest path to that is to get in a position where you can collect that as a rent, but assuming you're (i) the average unlucky joe, and (ii) somebody who wants to make a contribution, you need to be in a place where you're (a) creating > $150k a year in value and (b) in a position (politically) to get a good chunk of that pie.

Marx will tell you to work on (b) and that makes some sense, but I'll tell you from experience that it's a much better life to make $X for your boss and get paid $X/2 and it is to make $X for your boss and get paid $2X.

Practically, Job Shop work tends to be pretty marginal; the usual business model is to underquote work, lose money, but make it up in volume. It can be a nice biz if you've got sugar daddy customers who do stuff on a T&M basis, but otherwise job shops that look really profitable and productive today are frequently gone in a decade.

Now, you can make a lot more for your employer, potentially, if you're making a software product [or developing a SaaS-y service these days] but it's not at all unusual to put a man-decade into a product, spend $100K trying to sell it, and end up with $20K of revenue.

"Getting paid more" is therefore a matter of (a) making more value, and (b) getting a bigger piece of the pie. (a) interests me more these days -- I find it disturbing how much it costs to create business software and how bad the quality is usually is.

wake_up_sticky3• 16 years ago

Obviously I worded some things wrong in my original submission. I realize that offering a (much) higher salary won't necessarily (or even probably) prevent a "horde of unqualified candidates" from applying. What I meant was that if a hiring manager places an ad which fails to attract an adequate number of qualified candidates--the ratio between qualified and unqualified candidates being of secondary importance--he would have to be incompetent not to offer a better salary the next time around.

Also, the main point of the submission wasn't that programmers ought to be paid more. It was that I find it offensive when people claim that there are no good programmers out there but don't even seem to consider offering higher salaries. I'm reminded of the woman who is asked out five times a week by reasonably good-looking men of average social status, rejects them all out of hand, and then laments, "There are no men out there!"

Actually, this is worse. The woman may not be able to alter her personality or appearance enough to attract the caliber of man she's interested in; but companies can always offer higher salaries.

lessthanideal• 16 years ago

Money is obviously part of it, but now the whole picture. The difficulty in finding programmers that are gifted is not that you are competing with other companies, it's that you are competing with the programmer taking his ability and resulting wares directly to the consumer. Between startups and lifestyle businesses the lone programmer has a lot of options that other professions don't necessarily have (nurses, for example).

You have to keep in mind that you are competing with the excitement and potential earnings of running your own show.

winternett• 16 years ago

I am tired of being offered $120k for a 3month contract without things like parking, vacation, and health benefits. I am lucky to be employed full time currently. I always ignore recruiter calls of that kind because what it really means is $30k for 3 months, which creates a "mercenary" job environment out of what should really be a more full time/stable developer job environment. I can do that by marketing my own skills. Employers need to end the short-term hiring practices, they're artificially boosting the economic outlook and creating shoddy work that is a piecemeal result of several developers that work on DEV projects temporarily.

Rickasaurus• 16 years ago

As a highly skilled programmer, what I really want is a fair piece of the pie percentage wise. Even a high salary for the field compares little to the prospect of making exponentially more. Also, nothing motivates like having the product of your work bring you money or prestige directly.

Because I'm currently only a few years out of school, no one would come close to paying me what I really feel I deserve. Even in the best case, the long term for a programmer doesn't look all that great. This is an extremely ageist industry.

For this reason in my off hours I've been working on trying to increase my prestige through writing books, blogging, and speaking at events. Eventually, I hope this helps me either find a startup with excellent prospects or allows me to charge large amounts to existing companies for consulting.

I can't see doing this with a family though. It's a difficult road either way.

Stop complaining and pay programmers more

Related Stories